This Stunning NASA Simulation Shows A Galaxy's Entire Life History

This amazing video shows a NASA-created simulation of the entire life of a single-disk galaxy -- all the way from the Big Bang 13.5 billion years ago to the present time.

Disk galaxies are, as the name suggests, flattened circular volume of stars, and account for many of the galaxies in the universe -- including our very own Milky Way. This might only be a computer simulation of the life of such a galaxy, but it is completely mesmerising. NASA explains:

Colors indicate old stars (red), young stars (white and bright blue) and the distribution of gas density (pale blue); the view is 300,000 light-years across. The simulation ran on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research centre in Moffett Field, Calif., and required about 1 million CPU hours. It assumes a universe dominated by dark energy and dark matter.

Trending Stories Right Now

It's becoming increasingly clear that Facebook has never faced a scandal like the one it's currently fighting through. Revelations over the weekend about its reckless sharing of user data sent its stock price plunging on Monday, and fresh calls for regulations on the social media network are looking more real than ever.

Incoming South Australian Premier Steven Marshall has today revealed that the Liberal government will not continue with Jay Weatherill's plan to install batteries in thousands of low-income households. The new government's plan will instead focus on means-tested subsidies for battery systems, and on the grid scale a focus on interconnectivity with NSW.